Deeplinks Blog posts about Patents

This weekend, the New York Times published a fascinating portrait of Erich Spangenberg of IPNav, who has been called one of "one of the most notorious patent trolls in America." In the past five years, IPNav has sued 1,638 companies.

While the Times' profile includes many colorful details (such as the time Spangenberg purchased so much wine at a Christie's auction that it had to be delivered by an 18 wheel truck), this is not the important part of the story. What is far more important is the evidence that IPNav's business, and patent trolling more generally, is a huge tax on innovation.

A growing number of independent game developers have received demand letters from Treehouse Avatar Technologies for allegedly violating patent 8,180,858, a "Method and system for presenting data over a network based on network user choices and collecting real-time data related to said choices." Essentially, this patent covers creating a character online, and having the game log how many times a particular character trait was chosen.

In other words, an unbelievably basic data analytics method was somehow approved to become a patent.

First, we announced that the Patent Office had significantly narrowed one of ArrivalStar's favorite patents that it uses to target municipalities, civic organizations, and others who provide bus arrival data obtained via GPS.

The German Parliament recently took a huge step that would eliminate software patents (PDF) when it issued a joint motion requiring the German government to ensure that computer programs are only covered by copyright. Put differently, in Germany, software cannot be patented.

The Parliament's motion follows a similar announcement made by New Zealand's government last month (PDF), in which it determined that computer programs were not inventions or a manner of manufacture and, thus, cannot be patented.